Just Grow Something | Evidence-Based Home Gardening

This episode we’re going to get started with selling at farmer’s markets. This subject will be a two-parter. Planning a garden with the intention of selling some of it is different than just selling the extra you happen to grow, and we’ll talk all about all those details in part two. Today we’re going to walk through all the things I didn’t take into consideration before I started selling our prod...

This episode we’re digging into how to use cover crops in our home gardens. I kept saying I needed to do a full episode on this and we’re doing it today. This is not reserved for just big farms with thousands of acres of land. Using a cover crop in the home garden is beneficial in all kinds of ways and can be tailored to what you need: improving soil structure, preventing erosion, as a living mulc...

This episode we are digging into growing cut flowers in our garden. I am not a flower farmer, I’m a mediocre flower grower at best, but I love having cut flowers in my house and I’m determined to grow my own at some point. And since right now is the time we should be preparing our beds for the spring, and flower beds would be no exception, I thought it was the perfect time to talk to an expert. Ka...

Asparagus is a fantastic perennial, with healthy beds lasting as long as 30 years. Asparagus crowns are planted in spring, but the fall is when you want to prepare the bed. So, today we’ll go over everything you need to know about planting and growing asparagus so you can get your beds prepped in time and place those orders for spring crowns. In the question of the week, we’re talking another favo...

Depending on where you garden you may have just had your first frost or even a hard freeze. If you are one of my warm-climate gardeners, you’re steadily marching toward the time of year when plants begin to go dormant or, if you don’t have a Persephone Period, the time of year when growth slows dramatically. Now is the time to take advantage of that period of time to either put the garden to bed f...

This episode we’re going to tackle one way to grow onions for spring, depending on our location. We haven’t done a full onion episode yet and I promise we will because there’s a lot to unpack there, but since now is the time to get some types of onions in the ground depending on your goals, we’ll cover some of the basics and the how and why for overwintering. We’ll also review the Question of the...

This week we’re back to preserving our harvest! This episode we’ll talk about ways to dehydrate your fruits and veggies and how to use them when you’re ready, the basics of cold storage including temperature, light, and humidity requirements, and look a little bit at fermenting your garden goodness and whether or not that’s a viable way to actually store produce or just good for our gut health. I...

Karin's voice is shot! So, instead of talking about preserving our harvest through cold storage, dehydrating and fermenting like promised, this episode will be focusing on something shorter and sweeter: can you safely modify a recipe for preserving fruit in a water-bath canner by using less sugar? We'll also talk about why and how to prune or "top" your tomato and pepper plants as we get closer to...

Okay, here we go. The big beast: pressure canning. I know it can seem scary to have a giant pot on your stove that you think could explode at any moment and that fear probably stems from pictures you’ve seen of pressure canners doing just that: lids embedded into ceilings and exploded contents all over the walls. I’m here to tell you pressure canning is perfectly safe if you follow the instruction...

Last week we talked about the basics of freezing your garden harvest or your extra haul from the farmer’s market and that’s definitely an easy way to get started. But, if you’re really serious about preserving your food and hedging your bets against power outages or you just enjoy the texture of canned foods over frozen, the entry-level process for canning is the boiling water bath. This type of c...

This time of the gardening season is likely the time you’re seeing a bounty of goodness coming from your garden, especially if you’re in a climate where the summer heat is starting to wane just a little bit. This usually signals to my garden that it’s time to make one last hard push to reproduce, so the tomatoes and peppers and other summer plants start to push out all kinds of fruit. This is also...

This is the time of year when most gardeners in the Northern Hemisphere begin preserving their harvest. Summer's bounty is giving one last push and the cooling temperatures mean the fall garden is ramping up. Over the next few weeks, we'll talk about preserving that harvest, and this week is no different. But, instead of talking fruits and veggies for eating we're talking seeds for growing. Saving...

On Tuesday we talked all about the benefits of composting with worms and the basics of how to get started. Today, we talk to an expert. Lauren Cain is the founder and owner of Elm Dirt, a local Kansas City area company specializing in worm castings and products derived from those worm castings. Lauren’s company got its start in an unexpected way and, like all things at the beginning of 2020, took...

One thing I’ve been interested in starting for quite some time is vermicomposting, or worm farming, or composting with worms. Whatever you want to call it, composting with worms is a fantastic way to get rid of any food scraps out of your kitchen while creating a beautiful soil amendment for your garden. Having a worm bin in the basement where it can be easily accessed is a great way to give those...

The last couple weeks we’ve focused on selecting your fruit tree, preparing the soil and, finally, planting. Now it’s time to talk about maintaining that tree. Just like anything else in the garden, your fruit tree is going to give you a much greater harvest if you give it some attention. I will be the first to admit I am lousy at this. It’s not that I don’t know what to do and how to do it, it’s...

Last week, we talked all about how to choose the right fruit tree for your garden. We covered things like climate, available space, and the time it takes to maintain a tree. This week, we’ll dig into how to actually plant that tree. This is going to change, of course, based on what you’re planting and where you’re planting it, but the basics of it are pretty similar no matter the tree or the garde...

If you’ve ever dreamed of walking out into your yard and picking fresh, ripe fruit whenever you wanted, you’re not alone. Many of us are fruit lovers and wish we could have even just one tree that would produce our favorites. But the thought of whether or not a fruit tree would even fit in your yard, the care involved, whether or not you’d need a pollinator, how long it would take to get your firs...

What’s better than putting a plant out in the garden, tending to it lovingly, and then reaping the reward of a harvest at the end of the season? Planting that plant one time and reaping the rewards year after year after year, of course! That’s the beauty of a perennial fruit, vegetable, or herb. Plop that puppy into the ground one year and give it a little attention each season and it can continue...

It may be blistering hot where you are, I know it is here, but now’s the time to plan that fall garden. The biggest mistake I see with most fall gardens is they get planted too late. I did that many years in a row when I first started gardening. It just doesn’t seem like a good idea to be planting cool season crops in the heat of the summer and I would wait until September to get them in the groun...

This is it. 100 episodes! When I first started this podcast back in February of 2021, I did it because I wanted to share the knowledge I had gained while studying for my horticulture degree. Other than helping our farm business, I didn’t really have any plans for utilizing my degree after graduation. And, honestly, using it to help the farm would absolutely have been enough. There were things I le...

If you grow tomatoes, it’s very likely you’ve had some sort of disease attack your plants. In our area of west Central Missouri, it’s usually some early blight followed by Septoria leaf spot with maybe some powdery mildew thrown in just for fun. We may even experience tomato leaf curl if it’s a bad year for whiteflies. Every area has their own tomato diseases to contend with. On today’s episode we...

Just because you live in town or don’t actually want to do all the things doesn’t mean you can’t learn to do just a little bit more for yourself and your family in this modern globally connected world. It doesn’t matter where you live or where you are in life, you can be a little more reliant on yourself and your local community to make yourself a bit more secure in a very uncertain world. My gues...

When you think of homesteading, what comes to mind? Ma and Pa Ingles out on the prairie trying to build a home and raise a family with their own resources on a large plot of dusty land? Maybe you think of the early pictures of covered wagons crossing dangerous territories on their way to stake a claim out west. Yeah, me too! But, in reality, modern homesteading is nothing like that. Today, homeste...

I have a confession. When I was a teenager and young adult, I hated fresh green beans. I was used to eating them out of a can and, to me, fresh green beans were “fuzzy”. I definitely was tuned to the smooth, soft, already cooked texture of a canned green bean. I maintained that I didn’t like fresh green beans even after I started growing my own garden as an adult. It wasn’t until my third year of...

In most places in the U.S. there are multiple agencies that work with other agencies to get excess food into the hands of those who can best use it. Whether they work directly with food banks, social service organizations, shelters, and churches or if they have their own collection and distribution system, these agencies often run into a similar problem. They have a ton in the way of non-perishabl...